SteveStreeting.com

I think I’m going to think twice about blogging about positive progress on my back problems, because whenever I do it, I seem to have a small relapse the day after! I’m not a superstitious person, but it does seem to be a bit of a coincidence. Or, maybe it’s just that when things are starting to feel really good, I go a bit overboard and push it too much.

I was feeling great on Saturday after my week with a stand-up desk, so maybe I was a little too adventuruous with my activities that day, being in a good mood and feeling generally positive. First thing Sunday, still feeling fine, I’m rummaging about in a drawer for a T-shirt and I suddenly feel a horrible crackly sensation in my mid-back (not crackly in terms of sound, that’s just how it feels, like little lightning bolts crawling across the affected area), and from then on it was really painful. B*st*rd. Sleeping last night and getting up this morning was particularly difficult after that – when you’re not moving you feel like you’ve been kicked by a mule, and moving runs the risk of upgrading it to ‘meat cleaver class’, even though you have to do it because being stationary for too long guarantees more problems.

At least once I got moving this morning I started to feel better, but I’m super-paranoid about it again which is distracting. Hopefully it’ll improve again this week.

It’s been a whole week since I discarded my office chair and switched to a stand-up desk so, I’m guessing some of you are wondering how it’s gone.

Well, let’s start with the difficulties. Standing up for 8+ hours a day is tough on the feet, or at least on feet that have gotten used to taking it easy for most of the day – even with the odd break I’ve found my feet are extremely painful by the evening (those who work in retail are no doubt rolling their eyes by now and calling me a wuss).  Also, certain muscles (some in the back, some in the backs of the legs etc) that are not usually used for such long periods of time can get a bit tired after a whole week of doing it. At first, this made me think standing up was hurting my back, but it was really just a muscle fatigue issue and nothing like the back pain I get from my recurring problems. I’m sure my feet and muscles will toughen up with time though, once I become more accustomed to it. Obviously my Capisco will allow me to perch & rest for short periods at the right height once it arrives, but maybe it’s good that I’m having to take the tougher route initially.

So how about the benefits? So far, I’m really positive about this set-up. My back has been so much better this week; it’s felt much more stable and flexible, and first thing in the morning I’ve been less stiff. I feel much more energised too – standing up definitely improves my concentration and alertness, as well as not being so distracted by back pain, and having to get up to stretch all the time etc. In short, so far it’s fantastic, despite the sore feet, hamstrings and other muscles. I’m hoping this isn’t some kind of placebo effect and that long term, this is the way forward.

Based on what I’ve read though, it seems to make sense. Sitting down for long periods is said to have many detrimental effects on your body:

1. It puts anywhere up to 70% more strain on your back than standing or squatting, which are the 2 natural positions the human spine was actually designed for
2. It restricts the bloodflow to the legs, which as well as the DVT risks can make you more lethargic
3. It encourages sedentary behaviour – this is bad anytime, but in the case of backs it encourages dehydration of the disc walls, which can lead to stiff spinal segments (which can lead to instability)

Conversely, while working standing I’ve noticed these benefits:

1. Motion is built-in to your day – when you’re sitting down, you’re inclined not to move about much because it’s inconvenient to do so (beyond swiveling the chair). You generally need to have a reason to get up, and when you do so, the fact that your work can’t be done until you sit down again encourages you to minimise this time so you can get back to sitting down again to work. And for me with my back, each transition would involve stretching a bit when getting up, and spending some time getting settled comfortably back in the chair again. Having everything at a standing height completely eliminates this problem.
2. Seamless transitions – stepping away from the desk and back again incurs no ‘overhead’, in terms of needing to get out of the chair, get settled again afterward etc. Maybe it’s just a mental thing, but I found that when getting out of my chair, my ‘flow’ would often be interrupted, and I’d have to regain it when I got back again. This would discourage me from taking breaks, as well as penalising me (productivity-wise) when I did take them. Somehow, being in a standing position already seems to get rid of that, and I can happily walk away from the machine for a few minutes, come back to fix a build issue, wander away again to the bookshelf etc and never feel like my chain of thought is being interrupted. It’s like my day is altogether more fluid than it was before.
3. My ‘core stability’ muscles are being engaged pretty much all day to keep me upright, in varying configurations as I shift positions. For me, this seems much like doing mild exercise all day for the most important muscles when it comes to back trouble, which I’m sure has led to my back feeling less ‘fragile’. Usually I do specific exercises designed to stretch & strengthen these muscles without straining my back (which I’m still doing), but it appears simply standing around for a long time achieves much the same thing.
4. My concentration is much better. I’m sure this is down to a lot of factors – less pain (which is always distracting, even when you’ve learned to live with it in the background most of the time), better blood-flow, more actively maintained posture etc. Whatever blend of things it is, I’ve felt more productive and positive in the last week than I have at any time in the last 3 months.
5. I seem to need to drink a lot more water than usual, which is a good sign, since as noted many back problems result from a dehydration of your spinal discs (caused by compression and lack of activity over a long period). That probably helps concentration too.

So, while I’m nursing sore feet and muscles, I’m feeling good about this experiment, and hopeful that it might lead to a magical situation where I can both spend time at a computer and keep my back healthy. That’s nirvana for me, especially after a rocky few months. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I wish I knew 10 years ago what I know now, that no matter how expensive your chair, sitting in it for 10-12+ hours a day is very likely to screw your back up eventually. In my experience obsessing over the ergonomic aspects of your sitting position does no more than delay the problem (I’ve certainly done loads of adjustments over the last 5 years, and only succeeded in slowing the degeneration), and the only real answer is to eliminate the sitting position altogether. We apes just weren’t engineered to sit in chairs!

So, following on from my thoughts last week, I spent a little time today rearranging my main work area to accommodate working standing up. I’m just aiming for a temporary solution for the moment, so I can experiment with it and evaluate whether it’s going to help. Luckily, I have a ton of sturdy boxes left over from various technical purchases, so after trying out various combinations I came up with this:

Thanks go to my MacBook Pro, XBox 360, Pod and Netgear router (among others) for generously donating their boxes to the cause

Actually since that picture was taken I’ve put a couple of books under the keyboard / mouse shelf since my forearms were a little too much below the horizontal. Getting pictures taken of myself at the keyboard was very useful in determining the appropriate setup actually, the first attempt felt right when I was setting it up, but once Marie took a photo, I realised that the monitor was at least 10cm too low (your head is supposed to be pitched slightly downwards, only up to about 30 degrees, when looking at the middle of the screen).

Right now it’s pretty weird, and my feet start hurting far too quickly, but I’m going to stick with it and see how it goes. My back hurts a bit right now, but that may be down to moving stuff about and/or unfamiliarity with sustaining this position. I’ve ordered a Capisco which will allow me to take the weight off my feet while still being out of the demon sitting position, but I’ve been told it’ll take about 4 weeks for delivery, so I’m going to have to manage without it for now, perhaps sitting with the Macbook somewhere if I really need a rest.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I needed to get a new chair for my home office – the one I have now is 15 years old and doesn’t even have a lumbar support (so I supplement it with cushions). However, good chairs are expensive, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted – I had a more modern chair when I used to work in an office, and that still didn’t stop me getting back problems, and most recently I’ve had thorasic-region problems which aren’t directly addressed by a lumbar support anyway.

The issue is that sitting places far more stress on the back than standing/walking, and most back problems are made worse by immobility. I can definitely attest to both of these assertions from my recent experience, it’s just that addressing those issues has meant interruptions to my work schedule, a general loss of productivity, and some frustration at not being able to do all that I want to do.

I want to thank Martin for triggering off a thought chain last week about stand-up desk set-ups, which I hadn’t heard much about before. People like Churchill used these all their lives, where you stand at the desk most of the time, or perhaps use a tall chair like a draughtman’s stool if you want to take the weight off your legs for a while. As well as the general position being better for the back, you’re more likely to move about as a matter of course while standing up, and many people have cited productivity gains because the posture makes them more alert.

Finding these set-ups is another matter though. Most of the dedicated set-ups are rather old-fashioned, podium/writing desk sort of style, and not really the configuration I’m looking for, but a number of people around the internet have built their own, either by modding existing desks or going the whole hog. There are also height-adjustable desks that you can buy, a small number of which go up to the sort of height I need to stand at (about 1m), but unfortunately no-one I’ve talked to so far seems to do them over here; the best I found so far locally was an adjustable one to 85cm, which is still too low for standing at, and a mainland UK provider that won’t ship to the Channel Islands for fear of the mechanism being damaged in transit. I’ll keep looking, but I think I’m going to try retrofitting my existing desk instead, perhaps starting with a rough setup of a few bits of wood to make a raised surface on top of what I have, and refining it later if it works.

I still want a better chair though, since I don’t want to stand all of the day. The draughtsman’s stool idea isn’t bad, but I thought I could do better. Then I found lots of good reviews of the HAG Capisco. It’s pretty odd looking, compared to more traditional ergonomic chairs like the Herman Miller Aeron and will undoubtedly take some getting used to, but the key thing about it is that it’s a ‘saddle seat’ -  your legs are much more vertical, which puts your spine in a far better position than regular sitting does. The other nice thing about the Capisco is that you can reverse it and sit backwards if you need to lean forward with extra support (that’s why the back is such a weird shape – it’s a combination of back and arm-rests for both set-ups. The seat design also makes you use your muscles more actively which encourages more mobility. Back sufferers seem to be raving about it, which is what attracted me to it. Finally, it has the option to go high enough that you can use it with a standing-height desk as well as a regular height desk, which ticks the final box if I intend to turn my desk into a standing area too.

Anyone had any experience trying stand-up desking or the Capisco? Unfortunately again there are no places locally I can try out the Capisco, although reports from users on the web suggest that’s not a good way to evaluate it anyway, since it seems weird for a few days until you get used to it, so I’m probably going to have to order blind.

Yeah, it’s another personal / health post. Tsk.

It’s been a month since I started a new, more informed regime designed to address my back problems – regular walks, stretching & strengthening exercises and so forth. Generally, it’s gone well, although I did have a couple of ‘blips’ around Christmas and New Year. I’ve discovered some interesting facts from analysing what I’ve been doing and the results.

1. Variety is hugely important. Sitting at the desk too long is bad (as I now know), but equally lie-ins in bed, sitting on sofas playing games, watching films or just socialising (like over xmas) also set it off if I do any of it too much. Switching what I’m doing on a regular basis is vital. I now try to make sure that I’m always mixing up my routine, both within the day and between days. Exercise is part of that, but it’s no good just doing the same sedentary things all the time in between the 30-60 minutes daily exercise. That’s why you won’t see me on the 360 every night, and when you do, it’s usually for no more than a couple of hours at a time. Happily Rock Band is good variety to regular games, since it involves a mixture of postures depending on the instrument and drums are particularly active. The human body was designed for a large range of movement, and not using it is encouraging it to seize up. But no, I don’t intend to take up modern interpretive dance any time soon. Nor am I much of a fan of Wii Fit – I find the ‘trainers’ patronising and would much rather exercise in the real world.
2. Calibrating your limits, and pushing on them gently. After having so many disproportionately bad reactions from doing seemingly innocuous things, I became paranoid of doing almost anything potentially damaging to my back, avoiding anything I thought might come back to bite me the next day. I still have some moments like that on bad days, but I’ve come to realise that taking self-imposed limitations too far can in fact contribute to the problem, because motion & moderate stress are an important part of the spinal recovery process. Muscle tissue needs to be put under strain to get stronger, and discs can only absorb enough water & nutrients to repair themselves through motion. What the book’s regime has helped me do is become gradually more confident of where my limits are, and how much I can push them. I avoided drumming for a while for example, but I’ve found now that while it does still make me sore, I seem to be able to take a little more each time. The same goes for playing my relatively heavy electric guitar standing up with a strap – it adds some strain, but if I’m careful it’s manageable. Doing these things is also good because they add more variety (see 1).
3. Learning to pay attention to what your body tells you. Ok, that’s verging dangerously on hippie vegan talk, but it’s surprising how much information your body gives you that you generally ignore. When everything’s working generally ok, unless you’re of a certain disposition already you tend not to pay that much attention to the signals your fleshy transportation device sends to the master computer perched on top of your neck, aside from the more ‘extreme’ ones, so you’re just not used to processing the information when it suddenly becomes important to have to do so. Maybe that’s mostly a male thing. Anyway, learning to pay close attention certainly helps; what hurts, what doesn’t, what it feels like to stretch a particular muscle or ligament, how much force and at what angle stretches the right parts of the skeleton, how many clicks and where do you tend to get out of the spine when fully relaxed in a stretching position, etc. It’s particularly useful after having read the anatomy section & the related advice of the book I have, since it helps to know what’s good and what’s not, and why.
4. The Hitchhikers Guide was right – a towel is indeed your most versatile friend. Plenty of places sell all kinds of weird & wonderful devices designed to help you stretch your back for exorbitant prices, but in fact a large bath towel, folded or rolled in various configurations, is flexible enough to do everything you need. It’s no accident that physios have loads of them around. Ford was right; “If you want to survive out here, you’ve got to know where your towel is.“.

So there we go – the learning process continues, and hopefully so will the recovery.

Keen to ramp up the self-treatment of my recurring back problems, I hunted about for a good book on personal spinal therapy. I picked up a book a little while ago on pilates but found it next to useless, and although I’ve dabbled with yoga, so far I found the results a little random, and with seemingly little focus in these resources on the kinds of back issues I’ve been getting, I came to the conclusion that non-targetted application of these techniques was a very hit-and-miss affair, with potential to injure as well as assist. What I really needed was a resource that helped me deal with the very specific issues I was getting – and with backs, there seem to be a number of different things that can go wrong.

I found Sarah Keys’ book, The Back Sufferers Bible, through various review sites, and found a large number of people with what sounded like much more serious issues than I have highly recommending it. Sarah specialises in backs above all else, and has written a number of books on the subject over the past couple of decades. This book seemed like the ideal self-treatment text, so I ordered a copy, and it arrived a little under a week ago now.

I’m already quite impressed. The book goes into a large amount of detail about how the spine works, what can go wrong, and how to recover from it – more than any other book I’ve read, and contains much more information than I’ve got out of my various physio/osteotherapists in the past. Even better, I found within its various chapters an exact description of the recent problem I had, something she calls an ‘acute locked back’. Having had physios prod me and tell me my (latest, mid-back) problem was fairly unusual and hard to pin down, it was a great relief to see it described in such accurate detail – right down to how it felt immediately before, after, and longer term. Having seen so many articles that just focus on lumbar pain, I was so glad to find an author who clearly understood exactly what I had, and had exercises laid out specifically to deal with it. The text actually agreed with my most recent physio’s eventual recommendations, but what’s nice is that it has a much greater range of exercises to do, with more detail as to the kind of timescales involved, and when it’s safe to graduate from one type of exercise to another, and focussing on long-term recovery. It’s nice to see someone saying that the spine can get better too, and that it’s not inevitable that I’ll be on a downward slide for the rest of my life, provided I tackle it the right way.

One thing that the book also taught me was that dehydration was a risk issue. I’ve never been one to drink as much water as you’re supposed to in a day – for some reason I just don’t get that thirsty, and when we’re on holiday in a hot country my wife is always telling me to drink more, even though I don’t feel like I need it most of the time. Such a metabolism might be efficient in arid countries, but lack of water is one of the things that over a prolonged period of time can cause disc degeneration. So as well as my exercise I’m trying to remember to stay more hydrated.

So far, I feel quite a bit better. I’d dipped last week, which I now believe was mostly down to some over-enthusiastic drumming, but I’ve done some moderate drumming this week too, I’ve just been a little more sensible and combined it with the book’s exercises (as well as my daily walks), and I find that besides a little soreness, I’m able to cope much better and most of the stiffness, tenderness and most importantly the red-hot knifing pains, are gone. The exercises seem to be targeting my specific injury more effectively than other things I’ve tried in the past, and also allow me to start strengthening up my various trunk muscles again without putting adverse pressure on my spine; one of the problems I’ve had in the past.

It’s early days, but so far, so good. If it carries on like this, this book will have been a great investment.

Apologies in advance for another dull post about my varying spinal health. But, I figure friends, family and some people in my various online communites are interested in contextual stuff like this, so here we go. Hit up some other bookmark now if you’re bored

Since my epiphany 6 weeks ago I’ve been on what I realise is going to be a long road to recovery, and generally each week I’ve been improving, barring the odd minor blip. That was, until the middle of last week when I seemed to go backward a couple of steps, ending up with pain and stiffness in the middle back area which I associate with my most recent problem (as compared to the lower lumbar pain associated with my lingering problem from about 4 years ago). This has persisted all week – better some days, worse others – meaning that I’m having to be extra careful. I’m not sure exactly what triggered the relapse – it might be that Rock Band 2 came out and I did 2 hours of solid drumming one evening, it might have been the time we spent playing Left 4 Dead, it might have been that I’ve been playing my new guitar with a strap (extra weight on the shoulders), it might have been that I took a particularly brisk walk last Tuesday as I was in a rush to get back to work (and at that point my back was feeling great) – or something else.

What is frustrating is that the risk of relapse seems connected to almost anything I do. I sometimes feel trapped – that I can’t work as much as I want, can’t do many things I enjoy, can’t be too active, can’t be too inactive – it’s like I have to be afraid of doing anything because of the risk of setting it off again (except that of course doing nothing also makes it worse). Yesterday this really started to depress me a bit, and I’m generally a pretty hard guy to depress, being as defiantly optimistic as I usually am. I got over it, partly because of my wife, partly because we had a social evening last night which cheered me up, and partly because my ever-reliable sense of logic eventually kicked in and pointed out in no uncertain terms that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to help, and I was just wasting time.

So, I’m opting for a more scientific approach. I’m starting to keep a weekly record of how well my back is feeling, and noting down relevant events, and how much work/gaming/exercise I get during each week to try to correlate what’s helping, and what’s making it worse. I went back over my diary & blog to add a bit of history (higher numbers are better):

Obviously too much hunching at the desk was bad, as probably were long-haul flights. The games are mostly on there for interest – with the exception of heavy drumming on Rock Band 2 I don’t think any of them put any particular strain on my back, although Left 4 Dead is at the desk so I should keep that fairly light. Trips to the physio/osteo clearly help short-term but the only real way to conquer this long-term is to keep learning how to rehabilitate myself, and quick-fixes aren’t the way.

The positive note to take from this is that despite the last week, I’m still on an overall up since mid-October. As my wife keeps telling me, I need to resign myself to the fact that this is probably going to take a very long time to put right properly. Frustrating when you have a head full of projects (Ogre & otherwise) wanting to see the light of day, and when you just want to lead a ‘normal’ life without being in pain, or feeling afraid of what you can and can’t do. But, as ever there are plenty of people far worse off than I am in the world, and I have the benefit of a very understanding wife and a flexible working environment (I don’t get sick pay, but I can at least take breaks when I want and set my own workload), so I should stop wingeing and get on with it. I’m going to choose to be grateful that my red line is averaging an upward trend, and work on trying to keep it on that course as best I can.

OK, now I’m getting really pissed off. My back has got slightly better every day over the past week and a half – yesterday I went for my third physio appointment and everything was pretty hunky-dory, just a bit of soreness, but my range of movement was much better and his prodding barely hurt at all. I went more than 24 hours with no painkillers of any sort for the first time in ages, and this morning I felt great.

That is, until despite my being careful I accidentally twisted a very particular way in the shower and had a sudden sharp pain. It was only very fleeting, but now my back feels like it did this time last week – constantly sore and very painful to put any kind of stress on (e.g. bending down, carrying anything). To say I’m annoyed is a very large understatement. I need to be able to carry a rucksack with a laptop in it next week, and up until an hour ago I was feeling really happy that was going to be fine.

I’ve been doing some gentle exercise (walking) and it’s been helping a great deal, but it’s terrifying to know that I can do something so incredibly simple in the space of about 2 seconds to completely reverse my recovery process. It’s frustrating in the extreme.

Just a quick update on the health situation for those that are interested. I’m still in some pain but appear to be getting a little better each day. I’m still very sore most of the time, and mornings are the worst time as I try to slowly free up the swollen joints that have a tendency to seize up overnight, but I’m getting the knifing pain less and less, and I can walk much more normally so progress is being made. I am, however, still on quite a lot of drugs which means I’m a bit phased out at times. I’m also stupidly thirsty all the time, which is odd.

I’m spending some time at the desk, but I have to take a lot of breaks, and I’m certainly not at peak efficiency – I’m spending what productive time I have mostly on existing customer commitments, so Ogre is getting a little less attention than usual. I was in the forum briefly yesterday but I just cherry-picked a few things, and that’s likely to be the case for the next week at least.

I must say Monday’s events were a major wake-up call for me. As might have been apparent, I’ve had a bit of a peak of activity lately, what with OgreSpeedTree, Ogre 1.6 and a few new work projects coming on stream. I’ve also mentioned how Ogre has mostly slipped back into my spare time again. All in all it’s led to me spending more and more evenings and weekends at the desk again, and doing less and less other activity (Rock Band excluded, although even that suffered). I don’t resent this at all, I love my work, I love being self-employed and independent even with the lack of downtime that brings, and I love working on Ogre – and in addition I’m a stubborn git, so when faced with increasing demands I tend to just get my head down and put increasing effort in to meet it. I did have a few back twinges in the past 4 weeks but I generally just gritted my teeth and coped with it, or rested a bit for a day or two until it was better enough for me to resume business as usual. In hindsight, that wasn’t very wise.

I know, I know – people have been telling me for ages that I need to look after myself better (on this blog and otherwise), but I always find that hard when there’s so much to do. Unfortunately, being the stubborn idiot that I am, it really does take something as major as being carted off in an ambulance to finally get it into my thick skull that I might be pushing it a bit too far.

So, message finally received, loud and clear. My initial focus now is to recover enough by the end of the month to be able to travel without injuring myself (since I have a trip already booked), which means initially lots of rest interspersed with very gentle exercises. Then over the next year or two my goal is to gradually get back to the level of fitness I used to have some years ago (or as close as I can get). Believe it or not, I used to be really very fit in my early 20s, doing runs around the steep cliff paths here, regular martial arts training, all sorts. But that was 13-14 years ago now – if I can get even halfway back to that it’ll be a major boost. That means that instead of letting work take precedence all the time, my health will have to jump up to priority #1 (from about 5 or 6 ). Once I’m well enough to move about properly again, I think I’ll start with something relatively gentle, like swimming, and work up gradually from there.

As an impatient person I’ll no doubt have an urge to speed things up so I can get back to some project or other, but all I have to do is think back to this Monday if I find myself wanting to do that. Time to be more sensible, dumbass.

I woke up this morning feeling pretty good – sore, but better. Until I tried to move a certain way, at which point it was pain central again. After a couple of hours in which, despite having loaded up on over-the-counter Ibuprofen and Paracetamol it still felt like someone randomly taking a chainsaw to my back, I went to see both a doctor (for ‘pain management’) and a physiotherapist (for longer term help).

The doctor has given me some stronger painkillers and anti-inflammatories which are definitely better, although they do mean I can’t drive or operate machinery because they make you a little dopey, although I do think I’m more qualified to be a patent examiner. The physio after lots of prodding declared my back ‘interesting’ – which is not the first time (I’ve had similar assessments from previous physios and osteopaths) – quite why medical professionals feel the need to infer that my spine is of alien construction I’m not sure. I mean, if by ‘interesting’ they meant it could perform some great superhuman tricks like sprouting barbs (at which point I could find myself a tan brown suit and call myself ‘Hedgehogman’), that would be ok, rather than meaning ‘it’s buggered and we’re not entirely sure why’.

Anyway, his eventual conclusion of why it’s getting worse is that that my posture is actually too straight. That’s right folks, I apparently sit and stand too straight and I’m aggravating an existing injury on my thoracic vertebrae as the various ‘fins’ (technically the ‘processes’) rub against each other, produce swelling and then catch the nerves that are winding their way between. Sitting up straight pushes them together more, and pulling into an upright position from sitting (the ‘demon move’ for me right now) tenses all the muscles around there which also pulls them closer together, which aggravates the nerve, which makes the muscle spasm, which pulls the vertebrae – you can see where this is going. Classic cascade failure

So, his advice? Slouch more. Seriously – to take the pressure off these fins while I’m standing and sitting, I’m to deliberately curve my spine in the very way you’re always told is ‘bad posture’. I’m supposed to find relaxed, slouchy positions and then move as little as possible, except for some hourly exercises. When I’m walking, I’m to do it in a slouchy, hands-deep-in-cargo-pant-pockets kind of way. Essentially, I’m to act like I’m 17 again, just without the bad 80′s hair.

It’s weird, but it actually helps a bit so far. I spent a little time at the keyboard today, but I did it with the chair tilted back, feet on a footrest, and my keyboard on my lap, slightly hunched in a way I haven’t done for years, since I started sorting out the ergonomics of my work area to alleviate RSI. Who woulda thought such a set up was actually ergonomic in its own right?

I hope all this works anyway. I hate being off work, even partially, and these physio appointments are damn expensive! I probably won’t be in the forums much until this is sorted, if something is really urgent (and I mean really urgent), you can reach me on email in the meantime.